In the field of autonomous vehicles, the term “perception” relates to an autonomous vehicle obtaining information about its environment and current state through the use of various sensors.
Conventional perception systems tend to fail in a number of situations. In particular, conventional systems tend to fail in challenging environmental conditions, for example in environments where smoke or airborne dust is present. Many conventional perception systems tend to identify dust or smoke as an actual obstacle. Thus, the ability of an autonomous vehicle may be adversely affected because obstacles that are not present have been identified by the vehicle's perception system.
Separate to the field of autonomous vehicles, within the television and video industry a number of “Visual Quality Metrics” have been developed. Such metrics typically attempt to objectively quantify how a human viewer would evaluate the quality of a video stream or image. Typically, these metrics are developed to highlight errors caused by compression and transmission, and are frequently tailored to the human vision system.